If you’re serious about writing well, you probably learned you can always improve. Here are four simple techniques that have worked for me and my clients. Read Your Writing Aloud It’s hard to spot errors in copy that you’ve just written. We tend to see what we think we wrote. Reading your writing aloud is a » Read More
Category: Better Writing
Creativity is a Choice
If you’ve ever been around a bunch of 6-year-olds, you know they don’t have any trouble coming up with ideas. Ask for ideas and each child becomes a fountain, spraying ideas out into the world. That’s a human trait. We get good ideas all the time. What separates us from those 6-year-olds is that we don’t share them » Read More
Chasing Perfection
When Ben Franklin was in his 20s, he embarked on what he called “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He made a list of the virtues he wanted to practice and then set about keeping score. He marked out every instance of a violation of a virtue every day. There were several every day. I tracked » Read More
You tell stories all the time. Here’s how to do it better.
We love to tell and listen to stories. Human beings have been doing that since we first crawled out of caves. We use stories to explain to others what happened to us. We use stories to pack a lot of information in a small, easily digestible package. When someone says, “That reminds me of…” or “Let me tell you a » Read More
5 Experience-Tested Tips for Writers
I’ve been writing professionally for over half a century. I’ve written articles, books and booklets, blog posts, columns, direct response copy, and web copy. Today, I coach people whose day job isn’t writing as they write their book. I learned a lot from my own experience and from my clients. Here five tips that » Read More